Steve, Cathy, and Nicholas -- Nicholas the scientist (created 2009-04-29)

At Nicholas's school, there is an afterschool program called "Science Stars." We weren't sure if Nicholas would like this, but we signed him up. It has been very successful in at least one aspect, he now says it's his favorite part of school. Until recently, his favorite parts of school were either gym or recess. Here are some pictures of Nicholas at Science Stars.

Here, Nicholas is holding "flubber" or what I used to know as "silly putty."  It's supposed to show something about polymers, but I think most kids like it because you can squish it and bounce it.

Foaming and fizzing is another popular theme. Note the special Science Stars apron that Nicholas is using in this experiment.

I don't have a picture of this, but one of Nicholas's favorite experiments was the classic Mentos and Diet Coke experiment.

At home, we're conducting a science experiment of our own. You can buy these plastic figures that expand to three times their normal size when they are allowed to soak in water for a few days. We did this a year ago with a stingray and have now added a turtle to the mix.

Here is a picture of the turtle straight out of the package, and the stingray, which had dried out over several months.

Here's the turtle after a three day soak.

Here's the stingray after a three day soak. The poor stingray now has a broken tail. It's a small sacrifice to help train a future scientist.

What now?

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Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License. This page was written by Steve Simon and was last modified on 2017-06-15.